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Essays

  • Auteur:
    Irby, Samantha
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    A new rip-roaring essay collection from the smart, edgy, hilarious, unabashedly raunchy, and bestselling Samantha Irby. Irby is forty, and increasingly uncomfortable in her own skin despite what Inspirational Instagram Infographics have promised her. She has left her job as a receptionist at a veterinary clinic, has published successful books and has been friendzoned by Hollywood, left Chicago, and moved into a house with a garden that requires repairs and know-how with her wife in a Blue town in the middle of a Red state where she now hosts book clubs and makes mason jar salads. This is the bourgeois life of a Hallmark Channel dream. She goes on bad dates with new friends, spends weeks in Los Angeles taking meetings with "tv executives slash amateur astrologers" while being a "cheese fry-eating slightly damp Midwest person," "with neck pain and no cartilage in [her] knees," who still hides past due bills under her pillow. The essays in this collection draw on the raw, hilarious particulars of Irby's new life. Wow, No Thank You is Irby at her most unflinching, riotous, and relatable.

  • Auteur:
    Bourdain, Anthony
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    Anthony Bourdain saw more of the world than nearly anyone. This book presents his life of experience collected into an entertaining, practical, fun, and frank travel guide to some of his favorite places, in his own words. Supplementing Bourdain's words are a handful of essays by friends, colleagues, and family that tell even deeper stories about the place.

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    "In this pathbreaking collection of articles, Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall has taken us from the early 1830s to contemporary times. Only since the seventies have black women used the term "feminism." And yet, it is that concept that she uses to bring into the same frame the ideas and analyses of Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, and Frances W.E. Harper of the early nineteenth century, and the work of women such as the late Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, and bell hooks who stand on the threshold of the twenty-first century... She has refused to cut off contemporary African American women from the long line of sisters who have righteously struggled for the liberation of African American women from the dual oppressions of racism and sexism."-From the epilogue by Johnnetta B. Cole, President, Spelman College "The indefatigable Beverly Guy-Sheftall has put together a breathtaking sweep of African American feminist thought in one indispensable volume."-Elizabeth Spelman, Professor of Philosophy, Smith College

  • Auteur:
    Miles, Angela
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    An exciting Canadian collection of feminist articles that provide cutting-edge gender analysis for understanding diverse personal and political challenges and opportunities in our fast-changing global world. Canadian and international authors offer varied social justice, anti-racist, Indigenous, and subsistence perspectives on environmental, social, cultural, and political issues in women’s local and global struggles and visions for another world. Anyone wanting to under- stand Canadian and international neo-liberal policies’ impact on women and women’s growing understanding and resistance to these policies will be interested in this book. As well as women’s studies courses, this collection will be an indispensable resource for teachers seeking globally-informed, gender-, race-, class-, and Indigenous-aware Canadian resources for the study of sociology, international development, environmental studies, political economy, women’s human rights, labour studies, social policy, social work, international relations, migration/immigration, violence, poverty, militarism, colonialism and post-colonialism, social movements, global feminisms, peace, community organizing, sustainability and alternative possibilities.

  • Auteur:
    Angela, Miles
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    Canadian and international authors offer ground-breaking work in this collection that brings together almost seventy articles by formative feminist writers, researchers, activists and visionaries to illuminate the profound globalizing processes of our time. Critical analyses of current globalization and possible alternatives are presented in the context of global feminist dialogue and activism since the 1980s. Together, the articles provide a comprehensive overview of the agenda and processes of neo-liberal globalization; women’s activist responses to the consequent environmental and social destruction; and visionary feminist alternatives and worldviews. As well as women’s studies courses, this collection will be an indispensable resource for teachers seeking globally-informed, gender-, race-, class-, and Indigenous- aware Canadian resources for the study of sociology, international development, environmental studies, political economy, women’s human rights, labour studies, social policy, social work, international relations, migration/immigration, violence, poverty, militarism, colonialism and post-colonialism, social movements, global feminisms, peace, community organizing, sustainability and alternative possibilities.

  • Auteur:
    Vaughan, Genevieve
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    Women and the Gift Economy: A Radically Different Worldview is Possible is an attempt to respond to the need for deep and lasting social change in an epoch of dangerous crisis for all humans, cultures, and the planet. Featuring articles by well-known feminist activists and academics from around the world, this book points to ways to re-create the connections, which have been severed, between the gift economy, women, and the economies of Indigenous peoples, and to bring forward the gift paradigm as an approach to liberate us from the worldview of the market that is destroying life on the planet. Contributors to this volume argue that shifting to a gift paradigm can give us the radically different worldview which will make another, better, world possible.

  • Auteur:
    Knausgaard, Karl Ove
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    The second volume in his autobiographical quartet based on the seasons, Winter is an achingly beautiful collection of daily meditations and letters addressed directly to Knaugsaard's unborn daughter 2 December - It is strange that you exist, but that you don't know anything about what the world looks like. It's strange that there is a first time to see the sky, a first time to see the sun, a first time to feel the air against one's skin. It's strange that there is a first time to see a face, a tree, a lamp, pajamas, a shoe. In my life it almost never happens anymore. But soon it will. In just a few months, I will see you for the first time. In Winter, we rejoin the great Karl Ove Knausgaard as he waits for the birth of his daughter. In preparation for her arrival, he takes stock of the world, seeing it as if for the first time. In his inimitably sensitive style, he writes about the moon, water, messiness, owls, birthdays-to name just a handful of his subjects. These oh-so-familiar objects and ideas he fills with new meaning, taking nothing for granted or as given. New life is on the horizon, but the earth is also in hibernation, waiting for the warmer weather to return, and so a contradictory melancholy inflects his gaze. Startling, compassionate, and exquisitely beautiful, Knausgaard's writing is like nothing else. Somehow, he shows the world as it really is, at once mundane and sublime.

  • Auteur:
    Simms, William Gilmore
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    During William Gilmore Simms’s life (1806–1870), book reviews and critical essays became vital parts of American literary culture and intellectual discourse. Simms was an assiduous reviewer and essayist, proving by example the importance of those genres. William Gilmore Simms’s Selected Reviews on Literature and Civilization publishes for the first time in book form sixty-two examples of the writer’s hundreds of newspaper and periodical reviews and book notes as well as four important critical essays.  Together, the reviews and essays reveal the regional, national, and international dimensions of Simms’s intellectual interests.To frame the two distinct parts of Selected Reviews, James Everett Kibler, Jr., and David Moltke-Hansen have written a general introduction that considers the development of book reviewing and the authorship of essays in cultural and historical contexts. In part one, Kibler offers an introduction that examines Simms’s reviewing habits and the aesthetic and critical values that informed the author’s reviews. Kibler then publishes selected texts of reviews and provides historical and cultural backgrounds for each selection. Simms was an early proponent of the critical theories of Romantics such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edgar Allan Poe. Widely read in European history and literature, he reviewed works published in French, German, and classics in original Greek and Latin and in translation. Simms also was an early, ardent advocate of works of local color and of southern “backwoods” humorists of his day. Simms published notices of seven of Herman Melville’s novels, the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and favorably reviewed Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods.Simms published numerous review essays of twenty thousand or more words in literary journals and also republished two collections in book form. These volumes treated such subjects as Americanism in literature and the American Revolution in South Carolina. Yet, as part two of Selected Reviews demonstrates, Simms ranged much more widely in the intellectual milieu. Such cultural and political topics as the 1848 revolution in France, the history of the literary essay, the roles of women in the American Revolution, and the activities of the southern convention in Nashville in 1850 captured Simms’s attention. Moltke-Hansen’s introduction to part two examines Simms’s roles in, and responses to, the Romantic critical revolution and the other revolutions then roiling Europe and America.

  • Auteur:
    Van Tighem, Kevin
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    This selection of works by naturalist, hunter, conservation activist, and outdoors journalist Kevin Van Tighem will both inspire and provoke, because it offers an unflinching challenge to cherished myths and conventional wisdom in a troubled province beset with profound questions about its future. Even at their most provocative, however, these writings remind us of what is best about the Alberta spirit, and offer the possibility of a more sustaining relationship with our place and with one another. The rich imagery in these writings is drawn from the author's intimate relationship with the streams, forests, grasslands, and mountains of the Canadian West. There may be no sacred cows in Van Tighem's prose, but even the most unblinkingly critical of his writings resonate with a love of place and an abiding respect for the people whose lives he shares. He reminds us that Alberta's stories were always meant to be about much more than oil. At a time when social, economic, and environmental changes confront and confound what is still one of Canada's greatest provinces, we need better ways of remembering our past, knowing our present, and imagining our future. That's what this inspiring body of work offers — just in time for tomorrow.

  • Auteur:
    Garrett-Petts, W.F., Hoffman, James, Ratsoy, Ginny
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    Whose Culture Is It Anyway? Community Engagement in Small Cities extends the project, begun in The Small Cities Book: On the Cultural Future of Small Cities, by examining the cultural dynamics of the small city in a wide ranging context, now looking at activities in an array of geographies, economies, and cultural settings, as well as particularities such as the inner city, brownfield sites, an online conference on the art of engagement, and cultural indicators. Whose Culture Is It, Anyway? is a major contribution to the growing body of literature on the special character and value of small cities, especially aspects of their unique culture. This book, in focusing on community engagement in the arts in small cities, offers particular and theoretical perspectives on small cities in Canada and beyond.

  • Auteur:
    Evans, Rachel Held
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    Discover the new collection of original writings by Rachel Held Evans, whose reflections on faith and life continue to encourage, challenge, and influence, lovingly performed by Daniel Jonce Evans, Jeff Chu, Jamie Wright, Sarah Bessey, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Kristen Howerton, Kaitlin Curtice, Amanda Held Opelt, Rev. Neichelle R. Guidry, Ph.D., Candice Marie Benbow, Kathy Khang, the Rev. Wil Gafney, Ph.D., and Amena Brown. Rachel Held Evans is widely recognized for her theologically astute, profoundly honest, and beautifully personal books, which have guided, instructed, edified, and shaped Christians as they seek to live out a just and loving faith. At the time of her tragic death in 2019, Rachel was working on a new book about wholeheartedness. With the help of her close friend and author Jeff Chu, that work-in-progress has been woven together with some of her other unpublished writings into a rich collection of essays that ask candid questions about the stories we've been told-and the stories we tell-about our faith, our selves, and our world. This book is for the doubter and the dreamer, the seeker and the sojourner, those who long for a sense of spiritual wholeness as well as those who have been hurt by the Church but can't seem to let go of the story of Jesus. Through theological reflection and personal recollection, Rachel wrestles with God's grace and love, looks unsparingly at what the Church is and does, and explores universal human questions about becoming and belonging. An unforgettable, moving, and intimate book.

  • Auteur:
    Washuta, Elissa
    Sommaire:

    Throughout her life, Elissa Washuta has been surrounded by cheap facsimiles of Native spiritual tools and occult trends, "starter witch kits" of sage, rose quartz, and tarot cards packaged together in paper and plastic. Following a decade of abuse, addiction, PTSD, and heavy-duty drug treatment for a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder, she felt drawn to the real spirits and powers her dispossessed and discarded ancestors knew, while she undertook necessary work to find love and meaning. In this collection of intertwined essays, she writes about land, heartbreak, and colonization, about life without the escape hatch of intoxication, and about how she became a powerful witch. She interlaces stories from her forebears with cultural artifacts from her own life-Twin Peaks, the Oregon Trail II video game, a Claymation Satan, a YouTube video of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham-to explore questions of cultural inheritance and the particular danger, as a Native woman, of relaxing into romantic love under colonial rule.

  • Auteur:
    Huyler, Frank
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    From a doomed Iraq soldier to a self-destructive young woman to a talented artist, Frank Huyler reveals the gritty reality of medicine practiced on the razor's edge between life and death.

  • Auteur:
    Pfeil, Fred
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    In this series of fascinating and provocative essays, Fred Pfeil exposes the contradictions and constituencies in the ongoing reconstruction of white heterosexual masculinity during the 1980s and 1990s.

  • Auteur:
    Wiebe, Rudy
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    “The problem with writer longevity can be a complicating, even contradictory oeuvre. Hopefully.” Where the Truth Lies collects forty years of essays and speeches that award-winning author Rudy Wiebe has crafted throughout his career. In this illuminating and wide-ranging selection, Wiebe provides a look behind the curtain, revealing his thought processes as he worked on many of his great books. Within this book, he dissects controversies that arose after publication of his early novels, meditates on words and their inherent power, explores the great Canadian North and the Canadian body politic, reckons with his family history and Mennonite faith, all while providing an engaging and enlightening commentary. Where The Truth Lies is a vital compilation of a writing life.

  • Auteur:
    Sedaris, David
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    David Sedaris' remarkable ability to uncover the hilarious absurdity teeming just below the surface of everyday life is elevated to wilder and more entertaining heights than ever in this new book of stories. Sedaris proceeds from bizarre conundrums of daily life - the etiquette of having a lozenge fall from your mouth into the lap of a fellow passenger or how to soundproof your windows with LP covers against neurotic songbirds - to the most deeply resonant human truths. Taking in the parasitic worm that once lived in his mother-in-law's leg, an encounter with a dingo and the purchase of a human skeleton, and culminating in a brilliant account of his attempt to quit smoking - in Tokyo - David Sedaris' sixth story collection is a fresh masterpiece of comic writing.

  • Auteur:
    Holt, Jim
    Sommaire:

    From Jim Holt, New York Times bestselling author of Why Does the World Exist?, comes When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought, an entertaining and accessible audiobook guide to the most profound scientific and mathematical ideas of recent centuriesDoes time exist? What is infinity? Why do mirrors reverse left and right but not up and down? In this scintillating collection, Holt explores the human mind, the cosmos, and the thinkers who've tried to encompass the latter with the former. With his trademark clarity and humor, Holt probes the mysteries of quantum mechanics, the quest for the foundations of mathematics, and the nature of logic and truth. Along the way, he offers intimate biographical sketches of celebrated and neglected thinkers, from the physicist Emmy Noether to the computing pioneer Alan Turing and the discoverer of fractals, Benoit Mandelbrot. In this audiobook, Holt offers a painless and playful introduction to many of our most beautiful but least understood ideas, from Einsteinian relativity to string theory, and also invites listeners to consider why the greatest logician of the twentieth century believed the U.S. Constitution contained a terrible contradiction--and whether the universe truly has a future.

  • Auteur:
    Salutin, Rick
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    A lifetime of engagement with religion, philosophy, and activism in a series of fascinating reflections. Brilliant, fractious, mordantly funny, playwright/novelist/essayist Rick Salutin has been Canadian journalism's agent provocateur for over three decades. Whether needling governments and politicians, holding public policy to account, or decrying the shortfalls of activist thought and action, he has been one of the most outspoken commentators of his generation. In What Was I Thinking?, Salutin reveals his curiosity about both the world of the mind and the world of the here and now. His life has been graced with contact with extraordinary people from Hannah Arendt to Holocaust theologian Emil Fackenheim to goalkeeper-politician Ken Dryden, and we discover the profound influence their thought has had on his. But he has also had encounters with Conrad Black and Peter Worthington, joined his fellow coffee-drinkers in the infamous fight to save the west-end institution Dooney's from displacement by Starbucks, and taken furious potshots at the political pandering of the nation's media outlets. This is classic Salutin and most of it hasn't been published before-- including a lengthy personal and historical essay on the world of therapy. It's a wonderful roller-coaster ride of thought and opinion. Step on!

  • Auteur:
    Rather, Dan
    Sommaire:

    In a collection of original essays, the venerated television journalist, Dan Rather, celebrates our shared values and what matters most in our great country, and shows us what patriotism looks like. Writing about the institutions that sustain us, such as public libraries, public schools, and national parks; the values that have transformed us, such as the struggle for civil rights; and the drive toward science and innovation that has made the United States great, Rather will bring to bear his decades of experience on the frontlines of the world's biggest stories, and offer readers a way forward. After a career spent as reporter and anchor for CBS News, where he interviewed every living President since Eisenhower and was on the ground for every major event, from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to Watergate to 9/11, Rather has also become a hugely popular voice of reason on social media, with nearly two million Facebook followers and an engaged new audience who help to make many of his posts go viral. With his famously plainspoken voice and a fundamental sense of hope, Rather has written the book to inspire conversation and listening, and to remind us all how we are ultimately united.

  • Auteur:
    Prose, Francine
    Sommaire:

    In an age defined by hyperconnectivity and constant stimulation, Francine Prose makes a compelling case for the solitary act of reading and the great enjoyment it brings. This book includes selections culled from Prose's previous essays, reviews, and introductions, combined with new, never-before-published pieces that focus on her favorite works of fiction and nonfiction.

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